Discussion
fedi is the town square, in that you, random member of society, can wander in and be in that space and even speak your mind to your heart’s content, on matters large or small, to an audience or to no one at all, for any reason you so choose, and so can anyone else who is a member of society.
(fedi is actually some thousands of overlapping and partially co-existing town squares with really odd acoustics, but that’s beside this point, which I’ll ultimately get to, downthread now probably.)
it seems ludicrous to say that in an age where many folk have access to fiber optic internet connections at their heckin houses and high-speed internet comes in a half-dozen flavors and is nigh ubiquitous, particularly amongst most of the members of this meta-society we call fedi.
but it’s not the digital bandwidth I’m talking about. I’d like to point your attention to the medium bandwidth.
this town square operates mostly via the written word. plain text, mostly. and that changes all sorts of the dynamics of large groups of people often trying to communicate with each other in a town square environment, because here in the fediverse we do not have access to the broader range of communications by which we often share meaning.
adjusting to these differences, to the lack of affordances one is left with when one cannot depend on being able to see the facial reactions or vocal inflections or body language of those who are speaking, is difficult and requires a lot of practice in my experience.
but it is practice that is worth undertaking, and I think it behooves us to do so with intention, to actively seek to improve our ability to connect through this lower bandwidth form of communication with each other. not merely when we consider the tooling we use in order to communicate here, but in our communications with each other. being mindful of the limitations under which we all operate here. understanding that different members of this society are coming to the town square at a different point in their own personal practice of this form. because that’s what we want a society to be like, and things like this are actively part of how we could get there.
@djsundog I made this for blogging, but it applies just as much to tooting:
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
much like a town square (or the sum total of all towns square, er, town squares), there’s naught but convention preventing another random member of society in the town square(s) from replying to your mind speaking. sometimes they do it while you’re still talking, sometimes they wait for a signal of some sort that you’re now open for input on the subjects to which your mind was speaking, sometimes they just wander off nearby and start talking about what they think about what you were talking about.
town squares, am I right?
but one of the factors that makes fedi harder than your average town square is its bandwidth.